Sunday, August 31, 2014

A few days ago, the Public Editor of the New York Times reported on a study done by Jack Fischer, a student at Binghamton University. The basic conclusion of the study was that public universities got less coverage in the Times than private universities, controlling for other factors that could be expected to affect coverage. In reading the story, I was struck by the list of other factors: "The Times gives more coverage to colleges and universities that are highly ranked, larger, more liberal, and closer to New York. That's probably not surprising, but after controlling for those factors....." Size, distance from New York, and rankings [presumably US News] seem like good controls, but liberalism?* If you think of the control variables as representing the coverage that different institutions "deserve," it certainly doesn't belong. If you just think of other things that might affect coverage, I could see it as making some difference, but not as likely to be among the top factors. However, there is something going on: if you regress the logarithm of the number of articles on rankings, number of students, distance from New York (all logged), public/private, and the political rating, the t-ratio for college liberalism is 4.6.

So I added some other control variables. The obvious one was research quality. Presumably top research universities will be disproportionately represented in stories that report research finding or the opinions of "experts." There are good, although somewhat dated, measures of perceived research quality from a survey of graduate departments conducted by the National Research Council in the mid-1990s. H. J. Newton, a professor of statistics at Texas A & M, computed university averages, which are given here.**

Next I looked at the residuals from a regression of articles on rankings, size, distance from NYC, public/private, and graduate program rating. The largest positive residuals were for American, NYU, Georgetown, Fordham, and Berkeley. The largest negative ones were for Rochester, Worcester Polytechnic, Stevens Institute of Technology, Renssalaer Polytechnic, Purdue, and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

The residuals suggest two things: first, that distance from New York isn't an adequate measure of the Times's geographical focus; second, that it gives less attention to technical universities. So I added two variables: one for location in the northeast corridor (Washington to Boston) or on the West coast, and the other for technical universities. I defined both narrowly to minimize the chance of biasing things towards my expectations. For example, my definition of technical schools included only places called "Polytechnic," "Institute of Technology," or mentioning a specific application (mines or forestry). The estimated effects of both variables on coverage are highly significant, and when you include the political rating the estimate is considerably smaller than it had been and no longer statistically significant. The reason that the controls matter is that the universities which are rated as more liberal tend to be on the coasts or to have highly-ranked graduate programs.

This doesn't overturn Fischer's basic finding: with the new controls, the public/private difference is smaller but still statistically significant.

*The rating is from an organization called College Prowler. I couldn't find much information on it, but it seems to be derived from surveys of students who signed up on their website.
**The NRC did another round of ranking in 2010, but they changed the methodology, and the resulting rankings were widely and deservedly regarded as essentially worthless.

Monday, August 25, 2014

A little over a year ago, I had a post inspired by a New York Times story that referred to some research sponsored by Dove finding that only 4% of women considered themselves to be beautiful. The Times recently had another story which referred to the same study: "a mere 12 percent of women are satisfied by their looks and only 2 percent think of themselves as beautiful." Neither story gave a link to the Dove study, but a 1999 Gallup poll did ask people to rate their physical appearance. As I mention in that post, it's true that only 4% of women rate themselves as beautiful, but 40% say they are "attractive" and 53% say "average," leaving only 3% at "below average" or "unattractive." Also, 66% of women said they were "generally pleased with the way your body looks."

While checking to see if I'd missed any other relevant questions, I found a 2000 Gallup survey with a question very close to one asked back in 1950 and discussed in this post: "If you were a young man and looking for a bride, which would you prefer--a young woman who is very pretty or a young woman who is not pretty but has a lot of money." The 1950 asked the question of both men and women--the 2000 survey asked only men. Women in 2000 were asked if they were a young woman looking for a husband and had to choose between a handsome man and a man with money. That's a substantially different question, so I limit the comparison to men.

Comparing men's opinions in 1950 and 2000:

Pretty Money Other1950 34% 24% 42%2000 60% 24% 16%

That's a big change. The obvious explanation would be increased affluence--if you don't have to worry about making ends meet, you are less likely to focus on money. Breaking 2000 opinions down by income:

People with incomes below $20,000 per year are more likely to choose money, but beyond that income doesn't seem to matter. I also considered education, but that had no clear connection to opinions (people with more education might have been a bit more likely to choose "other"). So the historical change seems to represent some kind of cultural shift, not a direct result of increased affluence and education. If I find any more questions involving choices between money and other considerations I'll discuss them in a later post.

Two differences stand out as large (and are statistically significant): supporters of the nationalist right (the National Front and National Republican Party) are more likely to agree and supporters of one of the green/ecology parties are less likely to agree. Aside from that, there are no differences that aren't well within the range that could result from chance.

I look at France for two reasons: there are lots of parties to choose from, so you can distinguish different kinds of lefts and rights, and the party differences in opinion are larger in France than in the other countries. By and large, there was no clear difference between left and right.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

The New York Times recently had a news story and a Sunday review piece by Roger Cohen on antisemitism in Europe. I remember seeing stories like this from time to time, but I don't recall any of them citing survey data, even though it's the sort of thing you could certainly take a survey on. I looked an found a survey sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres in Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, the UK, and the United States. It was mostly about knowledge and beliefs about the Holocaust, but had a couple of questions that are pretty straightforward measures of antisemitism: agreement or disagreement with the statements "Jews are exploiting memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews for their own purposes" and "Now, as in the past, Jews exert too much influence on world events." The percent who agree or strongly agree (of those who have an opinion) for the nations:

Speaking of "Europe" in general is misleading--opinions in Britain are no different from the US, and those in Sweden and France are not much different. But negative views of Jews are a lot more common in Austria, German, and especially Poland.

The stories also suggested that that there was a difference in the social bases of antisemitism--that it was found among educated people or what Cohen called the "bien-pensant European left." If we limit it to college graduates (or the equivalent):

Compared to the average person, collage graduates are somewhat less likely to have unfavorable attitudes in all nations. There's one case in which the are more likely to have unfavorable attitudes (Germany and exploiting the memory) and one in which they are substantially less likely (France and influence on foreign affairs).

The survey also has data on party preference, but that will take more effort to sort out, so I'll leave it for another post.

Monday, August 4, 2014

The survey discussed in my last post also included a question: "suppose you could only have one child. Would you prefer that it be a boy or a girl?" Opinions about which sex is more courageous, intelligent, and creative help to predict preference. Putting that together with the questions discussed in my last post, intelligence and courage seem to be the most generally valued qualities: the predict preference in children, bosses, and views about women in politics. What predicts opinion about which sex is more intelligence and courageous? I tried a few standard variables.

Gender: women tend to be more favorable about women (for example, 43% of women think women are more intelligent, and only 14% think men are more intelligent, with the rest saying no difference; among men,opinions are split 29%-29%).

Education: no effect on opinions about which sex is more intelligent; more educated people less likely to think men are more courageous.

Age: not much difference; people aged 18-29 are less likely to say "no difference"

Political views: liberals have more favorable views of women.

I thought that there might be some tendency for younger people, more educated people, and liberals to say "no difference," whether because of egalitarianism or "political correctness." But that wasn't the case--in fact, younger people were less likely to say that there was no difference. As I discussed in a post a few years ago, people seem just as willing to offer generalizations about gender differences as they were 50+ years ago, although the content of those generalizations has changed.

About Me

I am a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, and editor of the journal Comparative Sociology. My book, Hypothesis Testing and Model Selection in the Social Sciences, was published by The Guilford Press in April 2016.